US Justice Department Transfers Copies of Proceedings to the Museum

The Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations (OSI) has donated to the Museum more than 50,000 pages of trial transcripts and decisions from litigation against US citizens or residents who were alleged to have participated in persecution on behalf of the Nazis or their allies.

The donation includes documents from more than 100 successful prosecutions (see the Lileikis case, below) of Nazis living in the United States. With the exception of records created immediately after the war, this collection from the past three decades will constitute the largest body of English-language, primary source material relating to the prosecution of Nazi criminals publicly available anywhere in the world.

The Museum has assisted OSI by granting access to key documentation that the Museum has microfilmed in archives in Germany, Eastern Europe, and the former Soviet Union and by providing expert historian witness testimony in prosecutions initiated and tried by OSI.

The story has received a great deal of media attention, including coverage by the Associated Press, National Public Radio, and CNN.

The Lileikis case

Former Lithuanian police chief Alexandras Lileikis was accused of being responsible for the mass murder of Jews during World War II while he was living in Massachusetts in 1982. No concrete evidence was found until the fall of the Soviet Union, when an investigator found many death warrants signed by Mr. Lileikis.

One of them authorized the deaths of a 6-year-old girl and her mother, Gita and Fruma Kaplan. Mr. Lileikis was stripped of his US citizenship and sent back to Lithuania.